A parallel collaborative sphere decoder for a MIMO communication system

In this paper, we propose a parallel collaborative sphere decoder with a scalable architecture promising quasi-maximum likelyhood performance with a relatively small amount of computational resources. This design offers a hardware-friendly algorithm using a modified node operation through fixing the variable complexity of the critical path caused by the sequential nature of the conventional sphere decoder (SD). It also reduces the computational complexity compared to the fixed-complexity sphere decoder (FSD) algorithm by tree pruning using collaboratively operated node operators. A Monte Carlo simulation shows that our proposed design can be implemented using only half the parallel operators compared to the approach using an ideal fully parallel scheme such as FSD, with only about a 7% increase of the normalized decoding time for MIMO dimensions of 16×16 with 16-QAM modulation.